I. The Man and His Times

At the close of the nineteenth century one English stu- Recent dent of the history of medicine said, "Galen is so inacces- Jf/^Qalen. sible to English readers that it is difficult to learn about him at first hand." ^ Another wrote, "There is, perhaps, no other instance of a man of equal intellectual rank who has been so persistently misunderstood and even misinter- preted." ^ A third obstacle to the ready comprehension of Galen has been that while more critical editions of some single works have been published by Helmreich and others in recent times,^ no complete edition of his works has ap- peared since that of Kiihn a century ago,^ which is now re- garded as very faulty.^ A fourth reason for neglect or
* James Finlayson, Galen: Two Bibliographical Demonstrations in the Library of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glas- gow, 1895. Since then I believe that the only work of Galen to be translated into English is On the Natural Faculties, ed. A. J. Brock, 1916 (Loeb Library).
^J. F. Payne, The Relation of Harvey to his Predecessors and especially to Galen: Harveian Oration of 1896, in The Lancet, Oct. 24, 1896, p. 113^.
^ In the Teubner texts : Scrip- tora minora, 1-3, ed. I. Marquardt,